Report: Nintendo to Wind Down Mobile Game Development

Nintendo entered the mobile arena in 2016 with lofty dreams of taking their world-renewed IP and putting it on mobile markets that would be accessible to everyone, regardless if they had the latest Nintendo tech. A good idea – on paper. In practice, however, Nintendo’s mobile offerings have struggled to stay relevant, and while Nintendo has managed to rake in about a billion dollars of revenue from mobile gaming, 60 percent of that money comes from Fire Emblem Heroes alone. Which means Super Mario Run, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, Mario Kart World Tour, and Dragalia Lost have all… struggled, to put it lightly.

So it’s not terribly surprising when Bloomberg reported that Nintendo is looking to wind down their mobile offerings.

According to the article in question, the reasons are quite understandable: for one, Nintendo originally entered the mobile market to compensate for the Wii U’s financial failure, but with the Switch being hotter than hot right now, that pressure to perform is relaxed. Secondly, since Nintendo is wary of controversy of any kind, they’ve actively sabotaged the usual “Freemium” model that less scrupulous mobile developers take advantage of to squeeze as many pennies out of players as possible, which in turn undercuts whatever advantage their recognizable IP might have offered.

Ace Research Institute analyst Hideki Yasuda was able to explain why Fire Emblem Heroes, the gatcha-style tactical game, was doing well-ish:
 

“You need an active long-running franchise with hundreds of attractive characters to make a good gacha game and then you’d need to keep adding new characters each month to retain players. Fire Emblem is the only Nintendo franchise capable of doing that.”

 
The full report goes on that while there is currently nothing in the pipeline, they don’t have any plans to shut down or remove any of the games currently being offered, and it’s not entirely unlikely they’ll release something new if it’s necessary to appease shareholders.

So it is the end of an… era? I guess?

Sure, we’ll call it an era.